In many industries long, continuous and multi-roll volumes of polymeric films are handled, treated or processed for a wide variety of purposes including coating, use in packaging equipment as interleaving etc. In all of these applications of polymer films the handling of the polymer films requires that to maintain continuity of operation, rolls of polymeric film be spliced “on the fly” as one supply roll is consumed and another is brought on line without slowing the particular production operation in which they are involved.
While a wide variety of methods, systems and devices have been developed for splicing such materials in such applications such as transverse roll traversing apparatus, laser welding etc. all such prior art systems tend to be relatively slow, often involving accumulators or the like, or if high speed relatively expensive due to the technology that is required to implement them.
Thus, there remains a need for a relatively simple yet high speed system or device for splicing polymeric film materials.